The data isn't screaming at us. That's an illusion caused by the flood of bad academic papers on the topic.

A good example is the Jonathan Haidt/Aaron Brown fiasco from a few years ago. Brown has been methodically trying to stop the stampede off yet another pseudo-scientific cliff but not enough people are listening.

https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-j...

https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres...

> In a recent article for Reason, I argued that the hundreds of studies that New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has assembled to support his claim that social media is causing the teen mental health crisis not only don't back up his claim; they undermine it.

Age verification campaigners like Haidt play a smooth game but consistently downplay how useless social science actually is for answering questions like this:

> I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).

It's possible that in the past few years a wealth of robust evidence has suddenly emerged but it seems doubtful.

This stuff does matter. If you misdiagnose the problem then congrats, you just let governments censor the internet - quite possibly creating a China style totalitarian system that pretends to be democratic along the way - and kids will still have the same problems. A bad outcome!